in the Melbourne Ministry, opposed
only by a handful of Radical and Irish members, carried through the
British Parliament a series of resolutions authorizing the Governor to
take from the Treasury without the consent of the Assembly the funds
needed for civil administration, offering control of all revenues in
return for a permanent civil list, and rejecting absolutely the demands
alike for a responsible Executive and for an elective Council.

British statesmanship was bankrupt. Its final answer to the demands for
redress was to stand pat. Papineau, without seeing what the end would
be, held to his course. Younger men, carried away by the passions he
had aroused, pushed on still more recklessly. If reform could not be
obtained within the British Empire, it must be sought by setting up an
independent republic on the St. Lawrence or by annexation to the United
States.

In Upper Canada, at the same time, matters had come to the verge of
rebellion. Sir John Colborne had, just before retiring as Lieutenant
Governor in 1836, added fuel to the flames by creating and endowing some
forty-four rectories, thus strengthening the grip of the Anglican Church
on the province. His successor, Sir Francis Bond Head, was a man of such
rash and unbalanced judgment as to lend support to the tradition that
he was appointed by mistake for his cousin, Edmund Head, who was made
Governor of United Canada twenty years later. He appointed to his
Executive Council three Reformers, Baldwin, Rolph, and Dunn, only to
make clear by his refusal to consult them his inability to understand
their demand for responsible government. All the members of the
Executive Council thereupon resigned, and the Assembly refused supplies.
Head dissolved the House and appealed to the people.

The weight of executive patronage, the insistence of the Governor that
British connection was at stake, the alarms caused by some injudicious
statements of Mackenzie and his Radical ally in England, Joseph Hume,
and the defection of the Methodists, whose leader, Egerton Ryerson, had
quarreled with Mackenzie, resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the
Reformers. The sting of defeat, the failure of the Family Compact to
carry out their eleventh hour promises of reform, and the passing of
Lord John Russell's reactionary resolutions convinced a section of the
Reform party, in Upper Canada as well as in Lower Canada, that an appeal
to force was the only way out.

Toward the end of